By HSIAO-CHING CHOU, P-I FOOD EDITOR

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, May 15, 2007

When Martha Marcellino joined the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn., in 1973, all she had known about cheese was the smoked cheddar her Sicilian father ate with his evening cocktail and provolone for sandwiches.

"I met one cow in my whole life before I came here," said the native of Milton, Mass., who is now known as Mother Noella. She also is fondly referred to as "the Cheese Nun," the very one who is the focus of the PBS documentary "The Cheese Nun: Sister Noella's Voyage of Discovery."

And, despite having lost her 90-year-old father last week and suffering a flare-up of an old back injury, she will travel to Seattle to attend the Seattle Cheese Festival at the Pike Place Market, which takes place Friday through Sunday.

"It's been an unusual week for me," she said. "But we made a commitment and my community is convinced I need to be (at the festival)."

In describing Mother Noella, it's hard to know where to begin. That she made the decision to drop out of Sarah Lawrence to become a cloistered nun is its own story. She was the youngest of six children born to the free-spirited William "Babe" and (the late) Mary "Maidie" Marcellino.

"They once went out to dinner in Boston and then called me the next morning from Puerto Rico," Mother Noella recalled about her insurance broker father and travel agent mother.

"It was hard for them. Because it's a cloistered community, they felt like they were losing me. But we don't abandon our families."

After visiting the Benedictine abbey for a retreat in 1970, Mother Noella discovered she was attracted to the structured lifestyle, in which she found a sense of freedom.

As a postulant, she would encounter many more cows. Her task was to milk them, which left an indelible impression on her.

"A cow will let you know when you are being impatient. With her foot, she'll gladly let you know what you're communicating."

In 1977, she was asked to step up to making the cheese. She knew nothing about how liquid milk evolves into a solid and prayed for help. Expertise arrived when Lydie Zawislak, a French woman from the Auvergne and a maker of that region's famous Saint Nectaire cheese, visited the abbey. One crash course and a year later, Mother Noella's Bethlehem cheese was the spitting image of its French cousin.

While most cloistered nuns live quiet lives, Mother Noella was drawn into academics after a 1985 incident involving an unaged, raw-milk cheese contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes was blamed for 29 deaths in California. The subsequent crackdown on dairies across the country resulted in Mother Noella's having to forgo the sawed-off whiskey barrel for a stainless-steel cheese vat.

What she eventually discovered in an experiment comparing cheese made in a steel vat versus cheese made in the barrel was that good bacteria grew in the wood and could fight the spread of E. coli. To protect the future of cheesemaking at the abbey, where the nuns sustain themselves by working the land and producing their own food, Mother Noella and her community decided it was essential to arm themselves with scientific knowledge.

"In order for us to carry on, we needed the accreditation and the expertise," she said.

So she returned to school. She started studying in 1987 at the University of Connecticut. In 2003, she graduated with a doctorate in microbiology.

The cheese molds that leave flavor complexity in their wake became Mother Noella's reason for having a microscope attached to her habit, which she wears in full at all times.

"I think they're beautiful," she said of the molds.

During her educational journey, she earned the "Cheese Nun" moniker and a Fulbright scholarship, which took her to France to study Geotrichum candidum, a mold that helps create flavor in some of the best French cheeses. It was this quest, involving nearly 20,000 miles of driving throughout France and countless samples of milk and mold from cheese caves, that attracted an American documentary maker in Paris, Patricia Thompson, who filmed "The Cheese Nun: Sister Noella's Voyage of Discovery."

"It took four years to make," Mother Noella said. "The editing is seamless: I love the interplay of scenes between the director of the lab in France and my professor at UConn. There were two years between those takes."

Mother Noella received a French fellowship to remain in the country to continue her research after her Fulbright project was finished. Her unprecedented work garnered her the French Food Spirit Award in December 2003.

"The key thing in all my studies is pondering diversity on a microbial level and a genetic level and culturally," she said. "We don't want things to flatten out and have everything be the same."

To offer a metaphor, Mother Noella described the abbey's choir, which has recorded several collections of Gregorian chant.

"We don't aim for every woman's voice to sound the same. You have 40 unique voices but we sound like one choir. It's an amazing diversity of voices and that's what we want in the cheese world."